The Bear Trap (2024-2025)
The Bear Trap is a multirotor quadcopter designed to be a simple and reliable platform to carry out competition mission tasks such as payload drop, waypoint pathing, and target localization. The quadcopter airframe design consists of a top and bottom plate made of carbon fiber which sandwiches the motor boom arms in a stiff structure designed for simplicity. The stiff nature of the airframe design and the carbon fiber used helps reduce structural vibrations, which are detrimental to flight controller performance.
The powertrain consists of 4110 340kv motors motors generating acombined 10 kg thrust kilos of thrust, giving The Bear Trap a thrust to weight ratio of 2.5rwr. The powertrain was carefully selected to give plenty of headroom on thrust while still remaining extremely efficient for long waypoint to waypoint flights. The system is powered by four 4s 5200 mAh batteries in 2s2p Lithium Polymer batteries.
The payloads on the aircraft consist of a Jetson Orin Nano onboard flight computer, a RaspberryPi based camera system, and a strobe beacon with a custom designed parachute and release mechanism. The Jetson onboard computer handles waypoint pathing, autonomous mission orchestration, and computer vision tasks.
